Generations and Other True Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  Except on the days when my father cranked up our old Farmall and drove it out of its shed to work the fields, and the days when my mother or my father started the car for a trip into the town, there were no noises of engines or motors on our place. The only other machinery sounds I remember were the thunk, thunk of the windmill sucker rod and the clatter of the old Singer sewing machine on which my mother made nearly all our clothes. It was powered by her feet on the treadle.

  Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt hadn’t yet brought electricity to our house, nor to any farmhouse in our part of Comanche County. My mother washed our clothes in a big iron pot that was sitting on a wood fire in the yard. She scrubbed them on a washboard with soap home-made of lye and the fat of our butchered hog, and ironed them with heavy irons heated on the burners of her kerosene cook stove. I sounded out the words of my first-grade Dick and Jane reader by the light of the coal-oil lamp on the round oak dining table. In winter, the only heat in the house was provided by a wood stove in the living room. When my father would pile in the logs and the kindling and douse them with kerosene and throw in a match in the chilly morning, we would huddle shivering around it, holding out our hands to catch the first waves of warmth, watching the walls of the stove slowly brighten to a rosy glow. Our milk and perishables were kept in a washtub with a big block of ice on the back porch. We brought the ice from town once a week, and covered the tub with an old blanket to hold in the cold. We owned a radio, but it was powered by car batteries, and our batteries were old and wouldn’t hold a charge. Since the war made it impossible to buy new ones, we didn’t hear the radio often. There was no telephone.

  We had a cold-water faucet in the kitchen. It was the only plumbing in the house, but it was more than many of our neighbors had. We bathed in a washtub in water heated on the kitchen stove, and went to an outdoor toilet that stood some distance from the house. In the winter, our visits there were infrequent and brief, especially at night and when a norther was blowing. In the summer, copperheads sometimes would be attracted to the toilet’s shade, and there were always spiders.

  I was born during the Great Depression, the eldest of five. Ours wasn’t the most prosperous farm in the county, but it wasn’t the poorest, either. My mother says the country people didn’t feel the Depression as acutely as the people in the town. Being a child, I didn’t feel it at all. Only years later would I learn I had been born during hard times.

  We were almost self-sufficient. Our cows provided all our milk and butter. Our chickens provided our eggs and part of our meat, especially for our Sunday dinners. My mother raised a large garden. The vegetables we didn’t eat fresh, she canned in Mason jars and stored in the cellar. We knocked pecans out of the trees in the creek bottoms. My father shot squirrels and rabbits and doves and quail and brought them home for us to eat. He raised most of the feed that our animals ate. Every winter, we butchered a hog, which provided not only bacon, ham, sausage, and pork chops, but lard and soap as well.

  Hog-killing day was one of the days it was fun to be a child on the farm. Despite the terrible scream the animal would make as it died on that cold morning, it was a day of laughter and good feeling.

  The neighbors—two or three families of them—would come. The men would kill the animal, scald its bristles off in a barrel of hot water, and butcher it. The women would salt the bacon and ham, sew the cloth sacks in which the meat would be hung in the smokehouse, grind and season the sausage, build a fire in the yard, throw the fat into my mother’s iron wash pot, and render it into lard. While the fat was boiling, they would toss strips of the hog’s skin into it and dip them out a few minutes later as golden, hot “cracklings,” a delicacy only faintly akin to the dry, cellophaned “pork skins” sold now in supermarkets.

  A lot of the work was done that way—neighbors helping each other out. The neighbors would help us butcher our hog or pick our cotton or reap and shock our oats or wheat, and we would help them with theirs. The women worked together on their canning and quilting. Everybody brought his own tools to whatever job needed doing. No money was offered or accepted among neighbors, but sometimes, when cash was needed, we would hire out to others. I remember dragging a cotton sack down the rows of Walker Bingham’s field with my parents one long, hot day, and when the work was over, Mr. Bingham—one of the more well-to-do farmers of the county—gave me a shiny quarter. It was the first wages I ever was paid. I remember how hard and sharp the cotton bolls were. I remember how tired my mother was that night.

  Threshing the grain was more fun than cotton picking. My family and the neighbors would reap the crop with a horse-drawn reaper not much changed from Cyrus McCormick’s original design. The machine would move around the field, cutting the plants, binding them into sheaves with twine, and spitting them onto the ground. Or was there another machine that bound the sheaves? I was very young. The rest of us would walk behind the reaper, stacking the sheaves into neat shocks. After the shocks had dried in the sun for a few days, the thresher would come.

  A truck pulled the huge machine from farm to farm. Its crew came with it. The thresher, our mothers warned us every year, was dangerous, full of pulleys and gears and belts and teeth. It took special knowledge to avoid its perils and, even so, many men lost arms in threshers. Each farmer paid the owner of the thresher in cash or in a share of the crop for the services of his machine, and the owner paid his crew.

  They would park the thresher in the middle of the field, and the neighbors would come with their pitchforks and help my father haul the sheaves to the thresher and the threshed grain to the barn in mule-drawn wagons, and help my mother cook the huge meal that the thresher crew and the field hands would consume under the live oak trees beside the windmill at noon.

  I was too young to know it then, but the work was brutal. Having so many people on the farm—normally a lonely place—was what made the day so full of laughter.

  Now all the work that was done by all those people can be done by one man on a combine. He can bring his lunch to the field with him and eat it alone in his air-conditioned cab and listen to his radio for company.

  The combine and other machines—huge, costly contraptions that have replaced the brawn of humans and animals with steel and internal combustion engines and fossil fuels—are part of the reason the countryside of Hamilton and Comanche counties has changed so much since I lived there. It doesn’t take as many heads and hands and shoulders and backs to run a farm now as it did then. Many families have lost their lands to markets and weather and banks, too. And many fields—those where King Cotton reigned too long—are worn out and good only for grazing now.

  So there are fewer farms than there used to be, and fewer farmers, and fewer neighbors. The fading remains of abandoned farm homes—leaning piles of rotting lumber, lone chimneys pointing skyward like work-worn fingers, groves of shade trees marking the home sites of long-departed families—dot the hills and prairies.

  But the dwindling few who still live on the land don’t have to do their laundry in the yard or read by lamplight or keep their food in washtubs or go to outdoor toilets. President Roosevelt’s electric lines reached their houses long ago. They own stereos and VCRs and computers. Television comes to them by satellite. They buy most of their food in supermarkets and most of their clothing at shopping centers and discount stores, like the people in the cities. Their cars and trucks take them as far away as they want to go, and all or most of the way is paved.

  Nearly all the young people ride those roads into the cities now, to schools and jobs that will divorce them from the land forever. There’s neither room nor livelihood for them anymore on the land of their ancestors.

  No one who lived through the old times and has a good memory would say all the changes in the rural places are bad. Most of the people who left have no serious yearning to go back. Not to stay. Not to work there as their parents and grandparents did. Not to try to wrestle a living from the stubborn soil in the old way. To build a little weekend retreat in the country so
meday, maybe. To go hunting or fishing. To try to find old landmarks that still live in memory. To visit the graves of their forebears.

  I don’t know how long ago my ancestors—the DeVolins, the Gibsons, the Whites, the Woolleys—settled in Hamilton and Comanche counties. Some of them, I know, moved there while the Comanches still roamed the land. All my great-grandparents and grandparents but one—my maternal grandmother, Clora DeVolin Gibson—are buried there. But no living member of any of my ancestral families is there now.

  There are thousands of families like us from many parts of rural America. Our exodus from the countryside happened all of a sudden, during the life span of a single, still-not-old generation—we who were the children in the Tabernacle during the great war that changed everything. And as our land has emptied, the little towns that lived to serve us have shriveled.

  The Carlton of my childhood had a cotton gin and a feed mill, two grocery stores, a blacksmith shop, three gas stations, a laundry, a feed store, a barber shop, a Masonic lodge, a beauty shop, a telephone office, a variety store, a post office, a doctor, and a drugstore. On a hill on the edge of the town stood the two-story stone schoolhouse where I went to first grade and my grandmother Gibson taught for many years. My great-grandfather’s name—I. J. Gibson—was on the cornerstone.

  But the school is shut down now. Its last class graduated in 1969. Of downtown Carlton, only one business—the grocery store that belonged to Hob Thompson—survives. The Tabernacle no longer stands amidst the churches. One of the churches—the Methodist—is dead. The others are fading shadows of the robust congregations they used to be. Their spizerinctum is gone. If the Tabernacle still stood, and if there were to be a revival, no mothers with babies would be there, and no children playing hide-and-seek among the cars. No young sinners would be moving down the aisle toward their salvation.

  Only a few dozen people remain in the town that used to be home to hundreds. Nearly all of them are old. As they depart, their places won’t be filled by newcomers or new generations. Soon Carlton—like Sunshine and Honey Grove and Fairy and Altman and Alexander and the other rural communities that time already has wiped from the countryside—will live only in the memories of a few old people, and then they’ll die, too.

  In 1986, the sesquicentennial year of the Republic of Texas, the remaining citizens of Carlton collected the memories of many families who used to live there and in the countryside around, and compiled them into a book. In it, Betty Jo Fine McKenney, a woman of my mother’s generation, wrote of her grandson, who lives in a city: “I have taken him to Carlton and shown him the names on the graves at the cemetery and explained to him how it was at one time, in the hope that we can pass it on to another generation.”

  My own sons were born in 1969 and 1971. They’ve always lived in cities. One day when they were small, I was telling them some of the things that I’ve told here, and one of them said: “You sound like you lived in pioneer days.” To children born after men had walked on the moon, boys who flew in airplanes when they were infants and studied computers along with their spelling and multiplication tables, these memories are of “pioneer days”—a time when Texas and America were younger, fresher, simpler, and less crowded than they are now. Even so, those days aren’t yet past memory, and the bitter words of the Old Testament’s Preacher needn’t be let to come true:

  “There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to happen among those who come after.”

  Those who come after should at least hear the echoes and see the shadows.

  1992

  To those who view life in a slightly skewed way—which, in my opinion, is the only sane way to look at it—the retirement of Gary Larson and the end of his daily newspaper cartoon, The Far Side, is a major calamity. So the guy is tired and also filthy rich. Big deal. He had no business leaving us to the likes of Nancy and Peanuts and Family Circus.

  After this piece ran, I spent weeks listening to long stories about other people’s nightmares.

  A Far-Gone Conclusion

  For years I suffer a recurring nightmare: I’m sitting in a college classroom, about to take a final exam in organic chemistry. Suddenly I realize: I haven’t attended a single lecture in this course! I’ve never opened the textbook! I know nothing about the subject of this exam! And it’s too late to drop the course!

  Then I wake up in a sweat.

  So one morning I see a cartoon in my newspaper: A classroom full of academic-looking people—professors, apparently—each holding a duck in his lap. Another professor, standing before them on a stage, is holding a duck under his arm. But in the midst of the crowd of duck-holders is a man with large, panic-filled eyes.

  The caption reads: “Suddenly, Professor Liebowitz realizes he has come to the seminar without his duck.”

  A cartoon about my nightmare!

  I laugh and laugh. Seeing my subconscious deep-night terror taken to such absurdity places the world and my life into a refreshingly bearable new perspective.

  Does the cartoon cure me of my recurring nightmare? Of course not. I still dream the thing about once a month. But now, when I wake up, I think of ducks.

  And there’s that other cartoon, captioned “The Elephant’s Nightmare”: An elephant is seated at a grand piano on a stage before a large audience, his eyes bulging with fear. He’s thinking: “What am I doing here? I can’t play this thing! I’m a flutist, for crying out loud!”

  I have that dream, too. I’m sitting at a piano on the stage at Ed Landreth Auditorium at Texas Christian University, a contestant in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Jackie Kennedy Onassis is in the audience. And I don’t know how to play the piano!

  I wake up thinking of elephants.

  These are common nightmares. Many people have them. They’re about the world we live in.

  The world—the American part of it—is divided into two parts: Those who attach clippings of Family Circus and Peanuts to their bulletin boards and refrigerator doors, and those who hang up The Far Side.

  The former group lives in the delusion that the world is a warm, fuzzy, safe, sweet-smelling place that makes sense; that people are good; that dogs and children are cute and harmless; that love conquers all; that right will prevail.

  The latter group knows better. Our world—the real world—is full of terror and night sweats. Danger lurks just outside our peripheral vision, ready to pounce, and we’re unprepared and helpless. It’s a world not far from The Far Side, inhabited by scoundrels, bunglers, monsters, nerds, insects, and cows, where evil and incompetence (an innocuous-looking form of evil) are determined to do us in. We know that, eventually, they will.

  The only sane thing to do in the face of such a world is laugh.

  Gary Larson has been helping us do that since January 1, 1980, when The Far Side made its debut in the San Francisco Chronicle. A few months later, it was offered to other newspapers through syndication. Since then, The Far Side has run every day in as many as nineteen hundred newspapers. It has been translated into seventeen languages. Mr. Larson’s small cluster of followers has grown to multitudes. He has amassed a fortune from the sale of nineteen Far Side books (twenty-eight million copies in print so far) and calendars, greeting cards, T-shirts, and coffee mugs bearing imprints of his cartoons.

  Oddly, he didn’t grow up dreaming of being a cartoonist. He was clerking in a music store, he writes in The PreHistory of The Far Side, a sort of autobiography and apologia, when one day “the sky seemed to suddenly open up over my head and a throng of beautiful angels came flying down and swirled around me. In glorious, lilting tones, their voices rang out, ‘You haaaaate your job, you haaaaaate your job.…’ And then they left.”

  Mr. Larson took a couple of days off. Sitting at the kitchen table, pondering the angelic visitation, he began to draw. “I never studied art other than the required classes in grade school and junior high,” he writes. “My love was science—specifically biology and, more s
pecifically, when placed in a common jar, which of two organisms would devour the other.”

  From Mr. Larson’s love of biology came the snakes, spiders, insects, crocodiles, gorillas, wolves, lions, deer, gazelles, rhinoceroses, fish, fleas, zebras, dinosaurs, amoebas, bears, penguins, slugs, elephants, sharks, whales, buffalo, aardvarks, butterflies, buzzards, earthworms, mammoths, porcupines, and squids that inhabit The Far Side. And scientists have acknowledged him as one of their own. Mr. Larson’s drawings of these uncute, uncuddly creatures have been exhibited at such scientific places as the Denver Museum of Natural History, Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and the Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon. Strigiphilus garylarsoni, a biting louse, was named in his honor.

  There are domestic fauna in Mr. Larson’s cartoons, too—dogs, cats, sheep, horses, ducks, chickens. And his trademark cows, which entered Mr. Larson’s life in 1980, only a few months after The Far Side began. One day he drew a cartoon of a cow trying to pole vault, clotheslining herself on the bar. Nearby, a cat is playing a fiddle and saying to an onlooker: “We’ve still got a couple of years before we’re ready for the moon.”

  “When I finished [drawing the cartoon],” Mr. Larson writes, “I sat back and stared at my little creation. Something moved me. This was more than just a cow—this was an entire career I was looking at.”

  People inhabit The Far Side, too—Neanderthals, Indians, cowboys, Tarzan, farmers, fishermen, nagging housewives, the Lone Ranger, nerdy children, Eskimos, Dr. Frankenstein, hunters, medieval torturers and their victims, Captain Ahab, explorers in pith helmets, and, of course, scientists in lab coats, one of whom is Albert Einstein. Satan appears from time to time. Also, space aliens and, occasionally, God.

  Whatever their genus, species, or planet of origin, all Far Side creatures behave pretty much alike. Whether as predator or as prey, their thoughts and actions are reprehensible, disgusting, incompetent, or stupid.